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Background

In mobile robotics a very prominent task is to explore an unknown environment. This can be applied for search and rescue missions after a natural disaster or extraterrestrial missions such as the exploration of planets. In such hostile environments the autonomy of the robots plays a crucial role in the mission success, as humans usually cannot intervene to aid the robots. For long lasting missions the robots therefore have to manage the available energy and possibly recharge their battery, e.g. at a docking station. This requires an estimation of the battery‘s SOC and the remaining distance the robot is still able to travel. To speed up the mission and to make it more reliable, multiple robots can work together in a team. With multiple robots coordination becomes necessary for recharging and exploration to avoid congestions and redundant exploration. Inspired by economics, coordination by market-based approaches like auctioning promise great flexibility and good performance.

Task

Goal of this thesis is the energy-aware coordination of multiple mobile robots during the exploration of unknown environments. The coordination should work fully autonomous and decentralized for flexibility and scalability. The work will be done using the Robot Operating System (ROS) which provides the basic functionality and allows a focus on the high-level concepts.

The thesis consists of three major steps:

Implementation of the coordination algorithm in ROS

Verification through simulations and practical experiments on different robot platforms

Performance evaluation through simulations in ROS

Interested students should have basic knowledge of the Linux operating system and the C++ programming language.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems (IWSOS) held in Karlsruhe, Germany, in February 2011. The nine revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully selected from 25 initial submissions. It was the 5th workshop in a series of multidisciplinary events dedicated to self-organization in networked systems with main focus on communication and computer networks. The papers address theoretical aspects of self-organization as well as applications in communication and computer networks and robot networks.